


i'm only here because you stole my heart

by thistidalwave



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Angst, Depressed Niall, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 14:19:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/610752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thistidalwave/pseuds/thistidalwave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Future!fic. Niall and Liam can't move on from the band and end up getting stuck in each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'm only here because you stole my heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bitnotgood](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bitnotgood/gifts).



> This is a Christmas present for my lovely Calley, who requested 'liam/niall angst' and immediately broke my heart. Only for her would I write something so devastating and title a 1D fic with 1D lyrics.
> 
> **Warning** for themes of depression.
> 
> There's also an equally sad mix for this [here](http://8tracks.com/thistidalwave/beats-heart).

Niall wakes up, as he does every day to his passive displeasure, when the sun makes it over the hill to the east of his cabin and shines through his living room windows.

This would be solved, Niall thinks, as he does most days, if he got curtains, or shut the shutters, or slept in his fucking bed like he’s supposed to. 

He kicks the blanket that’s tangled around his legs to the floor and gets up to make a cup of tea. The cup of tea he fell asleep in the middle of the night prior rests on the coffee table next to many of its fellow fallen warriors. Niall’s not going to do anything about that, just like he’s not going to do anything about the sun shining through his windows or the trainwreck that his life has become.

-

Two hours later, the cup of tea he made has become its own gravestone and he’s passed out on the couch again, face pressed into the cushions.

-

Niall lives his life in snapshots of consciousness, varying in exposure. Long exposure is nights awake and staring at his guitar, sometimes daring to pick it up and strum a few experimental chords before putting it back down again, a pen in between his lips that he sometimes uses to scribble a few useless lyrics on a piece of paper before throwing it away. He can spend hours like this, making new cups of tea and drinking them and then not cleaning the mug out, contemplating everything in his life he’s failed at, closing his eyes and wishing for oblivion or even just a five minute nap.

Short exposure is walking outside for five minutes before coming back inside exhausted, falling into his bed and sleeping for what feels like months but is never even twenty-four hours. It’s waking up for a moment to log on to his computer and check the gossip sites to make sure his old bandmates are still alive before falling asleep again, keyboard pressing indents into his cheek. It’s waking to the shrill sound of his phone ringing somewhere he can’t find it, but when he does he always has to call Louis back (he promised he would) and he has a conversation, if mumbling incoherent things until Louis snaps a reminder to keep his phone charged and hangs up can be called a conversation.

-

_indecent exposure,_ Niall scribbles on a piece of paper, then snorts to himself before balling it up and throwing it across the room. It lands in the cold fireplace and rests there, a splotch of white in black ashes.

-

Niall’s lying in his bed wishing loudly for the blankets on it to just get it over with and suffocate him already when he hears a distant sound like someone knocking. He wonders if he needs to add a tree blowing against the cabin to the very long list of things he hates about being alive before realising that no, that’s actually someone knocking at the door.

It takes another three minutes before Niall can even bring himself to move a muscle in an effort to get out of bed, and even then it’s not so much an effort as a slow crawl. 

He’s half expecting there to be no one there, but when he opens the door he’s greeted by Liam leaning against the doorframe.

“Niall,” Liam says. “I thought you’d never answer.”

Niall stares at him, blinking long and slow, and then shrugs.

“Louis was worried. You haven’t called him in three weeks, so he sent me to check on you,” Liam explains. 

Niall nods and opens the door the rest of the way, walking away from it and into the kitchen.

-

Liam sits on one end of the sofa, perched on the edge with his fingers wrapped tightly around his mug, while Niall sits on the other, sunk back into it but mirroring Liam’s grip. There’s enough room in between them for three people to fit if they squished together.

“I’m fine,” Niall says.

“You’ve been working on an album?” Liam asks.

Niall considers pouring his boiling hot tea out on his lap, decides it would be too dramatic. 

“I’m fine,” he says.

-

“How long are you staying?” Niall asks when he wakes up in the middle of the film Liam had put on his telly.

Liam glances over at him, thinks he could barely even touch and Niall’s bones would shatter. “However long,” he says. “I’m on hols from work for a week.”

Niall has already fallen back asleep. Liam turns off the film, tucks a blanket around Niall’s shoulders, and goes to sleep in Niall’s bed.

-

It had always been too much, really, Liam thinks, but in the beginning it was the good kind of too much, like when you order a small milkshake but you get a large and they apologise for getting your order wrong and give it to you for free. 

The thing is, Liam knows, that it tastes sweet and feels great going down, but later your stomach protests and then you’re on your knees in the bathroom, puking it back up and wondering why this is your life. 

Maybe it’s not like that for all of them--well, not maybe, it’s definitely not like that for Louis, with his settled family lifestyle, or Harry, with his solo career still flying high, or Zayn, with his still-a-pop-star girlfriend and underground DJ jobs, but these days Liam’s knees are permanently lined with the grooves of a tile floor.

He thinks that Niall understands what an upset stomach is like.

-

“Do you ever--” Liam starts, and Niall interrupts with, “No.”

“You don’t even know what I was going to ask,” Liam protests. 

“Don’t need to,” Niall says. “Don’t want to hear it. Nothing good starts with ‘do you ever’.”

“It used to,” is all Liam can think to say.

Niall’s eyes flutter closed. “That’s the problem.”

-

On his third day in the cabin, Liam decides something needs to be done. He goes around the place, gathering up every mug he can find, and dumps them all into the sink. He turns on the water as hot as it will go and gets to work.

-

Later, when Liam’s put on another film neither of them will watch, Niall reaches out and wraps his hand around Liam’s wrist, tugging him closer. He inspects Liam’s scalded red hands carefully and Liam lets him, stares at Niall’s hair and wonders when he let it get so that it’s almost entirely brown.

Niall eventually presses a kiss to each of Liam’s palms, carefully, like it might break him, and Liam is taken by surprise. Niall moves back to his side of the couch after that.

It’s the first time Niall has touched Liam since he arrived. The first time in months.

-

It isn’t that Liam hadn’t even tried to move on from the band, except how it’s that Liam hadn’t even tried to move on from the band.

-

After the mugs, Liam decides he may as well tackle everything else, too. He starts, the next morning while Niall is sitting on a windowsill in the living room, staring outside with a cup of cold tea in his hands, in the bathroom. 

He opens the medicine cabinet. It’s empty save for one prescription bottle, which Liam takes out, shakes--it’s full--and reads the label of before putting it back.

-

“How long has it been since you last took your medication?” Liam asks Niall. He’s trying to keep a calm, serious demeanour, but he’d also been trying to think of a more delicate way to bring the topic up than blurting it out over pizza, and look how that went. 

“None of your business,” Niall says around a mouthful of cheese and sausage. 

Liam picks at the edge of his pizza, opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again. “Niall--”

“I’m not hungry,” Niall says, dropping the remaining half of the slice he’d been working on into the box and getting up, walking into his bedroom and closing the door behind him. Liam stares at the pizza and tries to remember the last time he saw Niall smile.

-

Liam gives up on cleaning. It takes too much effort, anyway.

-

Louis calls. Niall’s mobile rings from somewhere in the shelves of records shoved into what Liam thinks is probably meant to be the dining room, and by the time Liam finds it, it’s silent again. He considers knocking on Niall’s door, but assumes he wouldn’t get anymore of an answer this time than he did the five other times he’s tried in the past two days. 

He rings Louis back himself instead, tells him that as far as he knows, Niall is still alive. “You’re still there,” Louis says, surprised. “Don’t you have work?” 

Liam thinks about the job as a bartender in London he got as a way to fill his time. “Not really,” he says. 

-

Niall echoes Louis a few hours later, nearing one in the morning, looming over Liam where he’s half-asleep on the couch. “You’re still here.”

“I’m still here,” Liam agrees blearily. 

Niall cocks his head to the side consideringly, then turns to go make tea.

-

Liam becomes a normal part of Niall’s routine--what little of a routine he can speak of, anyway. He’s always there, hovering on the edge of Niall’s vision, sitting in the armchair in the corner writing things into a notebook, accepting cups of tea as fast as Niall can make them.

Niall can’t decide whether he’s been desperate for the company or if he’s desperate for it to leave.

Maybe just desperate.

Probably.

-

A month into it, they’re eating Chinese take away sitting on the sofa when Niall abruptly puts his chicken aside and stares at Liam. Liam stops eating, chopsticks halfway to his mouth, and stares back.

“Do you ever feel like your heart is too big for your chest?” Niall asks. “Like there’s just so much of you and so much of everything else and it’s wonderful until you really think about it and then it’s just suffocating?”

Liam thinks about it for barely a second before saying, “All the time.”

“Me too,” Niall says, and picks up his chicken again like nothing had happened.

-

It’s not until two days later that Liam leans in and presses his lips to Niall’s. It feels, Niall thinks, like it used to when they were in the band and kissing was commonplace, something that happened between them all when something good happened, which was all the time until it wasn’t, and then Niall’s gasping a sob against Liam’s mouth and Liam’s teeth dig into his lip and it feels -

well - 

-

It doesn’t feel like it used to.

-

“Is this one of your songs?” Liam asks when Niall walks into the living room to find him smoothing out one the balled up pieces of paper and reading the words scrawled across it.

“No,” Niall says. 

-

“Are you happy?” Louis asks Liam during one of their now biweekly phone calls.

Liam thinks he might burst at the seams the question is so stupid.

-

Fucking Liam is to be unceremoniously split into two, letting bits of himself fly all over the room to rest on the floorboards and stick to the windowpanes, fire burning up through his body, and then be sewn back together with cold, careful fingers, strategic kisses to his hipbones and forehead.

Niall writes it down, thinks about keeping it, hears a melody somewhere distant in his head, and then snorts and throws it across the room just like the rest.

-

Liam picks it up later and scans the words, uncaps his pen and scrawls more underneath.

-

It isn’t that Niall hadn’t even tried to move on from the band, because he had. He’d had the idea of maybe becoming a producer, of working with other musicians and helping them become successful, making a name for Niall Horan in the linings of albums rather than splashed on the covers of them. 

So he’d tried, and it had worked. For a while. 

In the band everything had been _gogogo_ \--smile, look here, the same questions over and over--and sometimes it was trying, of course it was, but he had the good drugs to manage the chemicals in his brain and the support of his boys behind him, four people constantly present, always knowing the right things to say or do.

With producing it wasn’t the same, not really, but it had the same elements of networking involved, and it was an entirely different world he was trying to break into, too, and Niall still had the good drugs, of course, but he was on his own, no one to catch his slack on a bad day, no one to bring him away from the edge with a touch. Smiling through it like he always had abruptly became impossible. 

Eventually he gave up trying. He told everyone he just changed his mind, he did want a solo career after all and he was going to write his own music and all, but he knows the truth. He knows that all he did was run away.

-

“Have you ever done this with anyone else?” Niall asks once, sitting up in bed and craving a smoke even though he doesn’t smoke, only ever did socially. 

“Had sex?” Liam says, peering up through his lashes from where he’s curled with his cheek pressed against Niall’s lap, playing absently mindedly with the duvet. “Yeah.”

Niall rolls his eyes. He thinks that he wouldn’t call what they do having sex, not really. It’s more like, he imagines, two people that have just abandoned the sinking Titanic and are clutching at each other and sinking into frigid water and knowing they’re about to die.

He’s not going to bother clarifying what he meant, but then Liam says, “There was a guy--he came into the bar I worked at.”

Niall hums noncommittally. Liam is silent again.

-

Hours later, when Niall has gone to make more tea, Liam tells the empty room, “It wasn’t like this, though.”

-

Zayn calls. 

“You getting work done?” he asks Niall. “Looking forward to seeing it finished, mate. And you could send whatever rough stuff to me, y’know?”

“I know,” Niall says. “Liam’s staying with me.”

“I know,” Zayn replies. The line is silent but for crinkles of static, and then, “I miss you.”

Niall nods into the phone, bites back a sob and hangs up. 

-

It scares Liam just how deeply and for how long Niall can and does sleep sometimes now. He gets scared that Niall has actually died and has to sit next to wherever Niall is passed out, his palm pressed to Niall’s chest where he can feel his heartbeat and his chest rising and falling. 

-

They eventually give up pretending they’re not doing this, though they made a valiant effort for weeks. Niall sits down next to Liam on the edge of the armchair where before it had been an unspoken agreement that Niall wouldn’t disturb him when he was sitting there, and points at a line on the page in front of Liam.

“This needs rewording,” Niall says.

“I didn’t want to change yours,” Liam says after a stunned moment. 

Niall shakes his head and takes the pen from Liam’s hand, scratches out a few things and scribbles new ones in. “There,” he says. “It was me who changed it.”

-

Where everything had been long expanses of quiet broken by the clink of mugs of tea and heavy, hot breaths and pens scratching across paper for the past few months, it becomes loud guitar strums and yelling at each other about word choice, arguments that nine times out of ten end in sex and agreement.

It’s more strange and more familiar, and it makes Liam’s heart ache with remembering.

Once he swears Niall laughs at something, just for a moment, and when he looks up he thinks he catches Niall smiling, but it’s gone when he blinks. He still drops his pen, though, and he has this urge to just walk away and be alone for a moment.

He doesn’t, though, because he feels like he would owe Niall an explanation, so instead he leans over to where Niall is picking out sounds and kisses him, and Niall lets the guitar fall away without a question, lets Liam lose himself in everything they are and were and could be.

-

They work day and night without pause most of the time. They’re both perfectionists in their own right, and they both have their own opinions, and they fight each other every bar of the way, but they always agree eventually, settling into the right sounds like they knew all along. 

It reminds Niall of the way Liam pushes him against the wall and marks him up, the way Niall pushes Liam into the sheets and pulls him apart in long unravelling pieces, the way they fit together and get it right.

(All along there’s space for three more somewhere in the cracks they’ve inked into each other’s skin. Sometimes Liam finds himself writing out a third harmony line and has to rip the paper into tiny pieces. Sometimes Niall adds a note to the melody that doesn’t fall easily into his or Liam’s ranges and has to put down his guitar and go make a cup of tea.)

-

Harry appears at the door one day when they haven’t slept in longer than either of them can remember, looking windswept and beaming brightly. He’s blinding, Niall thinks, squinting from clear across the cabin.

“I called Louis yesterday,” Liam says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

“You called him two days ago,” Harry corrects. “You look busy.”

“We are,” Niall says.

-

Harry can’t stay long anyway, needs to get back to London for something or other that Liam wants to be attentive to but can’t sit still long enough to manage it. He asks if he can see what they’re working on, and when Niall snaps out a negative, Liam doesn’t protest.

(He shows Harry one later when Niall’s asleep, the one about dark curls and promises that Liam really has done most of the work so far on, and Harry looks at him sadly, leans in and hugs him. He smells of freesias and vanilla, the hair gel he’s always used and regret.)

-

“You’re doing well,” Harry says, hugging them both before he leaves the next day. Neither Liam nor Niall think he’s telling the truth.

-

“Kissing you,” Niall says, dragging his fingers over Liam’s forearm, “feels like a sold out crowd and an empty stadium at the same time. Do you get that?” He’s desperate to know the answer even though he’s sure that if anyone understands, it’s Liam.

Liam stares at where Niall’s fingers are brushing back and forth, back and forth. _Everything I Wanted But Nothing I’ll Ever Need._

He catches Niall’s hand with his, laces their fingers together, and doesn't answer.

-

Both Liam and Niall talk to Louis’ oldest on the phone because _she insists, just for a minute, she won’t leave me alone so please do this._

“Dad says you’re writing songs,” she says into Niall’s ear. She sounds older than he thinks she should. “In your cabin way away far away.”

“Yeah, babe, we are,” he says.

“Play me a song,” she demands, then adds, “Please.”

Niall hands the phone to Liam. He listens for a moment, then nods. “We will,” he says, “we’ll come see you and sing you a song.” He meets Niall’s eyes as he says it, and Niall’s surprised to find the idea doesn’t make him want to shrivel up inside. He shrugs.

-

When they finish writing, it’s a silent agreement that they’re done, that this is what they’ve accomplished, this is what they’re okay, if not comfortable, with other people listening to, and then they fuck like it’s the last time they’re ever going to get the chance, bruising each other’s skin with blind intent and smoothing over the hurt with their next movement.

When Liam passes out, Niall slips out of the bed and into the bathroom. He opens the medicine cabinet and takes out the pill bottle that’s sitting there. 

It’s expired, he’ll need to go into town to get it refilled, but he leaves it sitting next to the sink and crawls back into bed, wrapping his limbs around Liam and pulling him close.

It’s time, he thinks.

-

They get lost in each other, Niall and Liam do, in their own reflections staring back at them, and it’s not like when they were lost in themselves, and there’s no telling if it’s an improvement or a black hole pulling them in. 

Niall pours two cups of tea, strong, with three sugars and cream in both, and thinks that he would rather have something to wrap his fingers around than be flailing in mid air, even if either way he's going down.

-

“Are you two ready to come into the studio?”a producer from Harry’s record label asks them over the phone. “This is going to require some work, not the songs so much, but the marketing after we’ve got those recorded. I don’t want you to feel pressured to come back full force if you’re not ready, so think about it and call me back tomorrow.”

-

They call back early the next morning and say no, because really the answer was obvious the second they looked at each other after they hung up. 

-

“Are you happy?” Zayn asks Liam in the middle of Liam reeling off details about the album.

The question is still stupid, Liam thinks, but he tells Zayn yes anyway.

-

They find a tiny indie label with Zayn’s help. The label is ecstatic to have them and assures them that all they need to do is record the album in the studio and they can handle it from there.

-

Harry brings a box of CDs when he visits six weeks later. Niall opens it and takes one out, holds months of their work in his hands, years of his life and more of his emotions than he can fathom in one moment. Liam takes it from him, stares at it, and then sets it back in the box, still wrapped in shiny plastic. He feels vaguely sick.

“I’ve listened to it maybe a thousand times already,” Harry says. “It’s amazing. You’re amazing.”

-

Louis and Zayn arrive together three days later and the five of them wordlessly hug, the front door still wide open and blowing cold gusts of wind over them. 

-

Niall wakes up for no apparent reason in the middle of the night, Harry snuffling into his neck and Zayn curled into his side. One of Louis’ cold feet presses into Niall’s shin and he flinches but doesn’t move away. He can see tufts of Liam’s hair sprawling across the pillow when he turns his head to the left. Niall feels all of nineteen, except for how his heart was in one piece back then rather than the shattered mess it is now.

-

Eventually Harry and Louis and Zayn have to leave, like Liam and Niall knew they would. Everyone hugs and everyone cries, and once they're gone Niall makes tea and goes back to bed without drinking it. Liam finishes his own tea before joining him.

He wakes sometime later to the feather light touch of Niall ghosting his thumb over Liam’s wrist, right above his tattoo. 

Liam looks up and meets his eyes in a staring contest until Niall wraps his hand hard around Liam’s wrist, pulling his arm up and pressing it down in one smooth motion. Liam leans up to meet him in a clash of lips on lips that melts into a soft press against each other as Niall rolls over on top of Liam, every inch of them overlapping, and he thinks _Only time will tell..._


End file.
